Amazon's custom Graviton ARM processor was almost an AMD offering

Interesting that they're going with their own 2.3GHz CPUs when Qualcomm has had server grade 2.5GHz ARM for a year as well.

Haven't read up on Qualcomm's server stuff for a while, but wasn't their stuff not a little insane with the core count? 48 or something like that?

Amazon's offering is a 16-core, so it seems like they didn't want to start with a huge/expensive chip design like Qualcomm's chip. Perhaps they want to start with lower-end servers and work their way up.
 
I'm not sure it does make sense, these are rented out on a per CPU basis. You can buy an instance with 1 CPU + 2GB RAM, 2C+4G, and so on upto 16CPU+32GB, with a set cost per hour per CPU. Essentially, each CPU in the SoC needs dedicated headroom in terms of memory, bandwidth and thermal envelope to operate relatively independantly of a completely separate instance on the same SoC. Qualcomms 48 cores however are 6 clusters of 4 duplex's, each containing 2 cores, with much more focus on thread coherency rather than isolation(Though both are necessary for both architectures, just in different ways with different sacrifices).

We don't know the intricacies of Amazon's core & cache architecture yet but from the sounds of it this SoC is pretty specialised for this task of virtual CPU instancing, whereas Qualcomms is more of a general datacenter chip.
 
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